


Mobius

by NotariconLite (Notaricon)



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Aging, Frisk is Tired, Gen, Gender-Neutral Frisk, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Mentions of Death, On Hiatus, Spoilers - Undertale Genocide Route, Spoilers - Undertale Pacifist Route, Time Loop, Under revision, Verbal Frisk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-05-01 17:37:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5214680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Notaricon/pseuds/NotariconLite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They woke on a bed of golden flowers, the echo of a voice ringing in their head.</i>
</p><p>Everything resets. Everything except Frisk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Toriel

**Author's Note:**

> This concept has likely been done to death, but hell if that's stopping me.
> 
> Thank you for hauling me back into fandom, Undertale.

They woke on a bed of golden flowers, the echo of a voice ringing in their head.

Frisk had felt the strange hum of magic for the first time in the palm of Toriel’s hand. She had led them, stumbling and small, through a maze of glittering spikes, and the magic of her had wormed like quicksilver under their skin. 

Sometimes, they stayed with her. They stayed in her tidy house, with its clean, crumbling stone walls and its warm wood floors. Their bed smelled of cinnamon and dust, and on quiet nights, they would turn their face into their pillow and cease – just for a moment – to breathe. They would sink into the silent black and wonder, wonder. 

They had seen her die. They had let her live. 

They didn’t know which was kinder, anymore.

She persisted in calling them child no matter how they grew. This time, they had stayed with her for years. It was easier not to think of the beginning, when they were so close to it. Easier for it to blur into the day to day, until the thought of it went dull about the edges. 

The time always came, though, for them to leave. It crept up like an icy chill as they played in the rust-red leaves that heaped beneath Toriel’s great, black tree. It took hold of them like a vise, the need an urgent whisper that sat writhing in the pit of their stomach. They could nearly feel the flutter of breath against their ear, as though some other child was there with them beneath the branches of that gnarled tree. 

They’d heard it before. Sometimes, it was not a whisper, but a shriek – a terrible compulsion. 

They’d never truly understood where it came from.

That night, Frisk had gone to Toriel. They had sat at her feet as she read, tucked into her favourite chair, and turned their face toward the warmth of the fire like a flower turning into the sun. The comparison struck them like a blow, and they shuddered. 

“Is something troubling you, small one?”

They had asked her countless times how to leave the ruins. The frisson of pain that flashed across her gentle face made their heart clench, all the same. Quietly, she excused herself, making for the winding hall they knew sat coiled beneath her cozy little house. 

A long moment passed before Frisk rose to pursue her. Somehow, they knew she would hesitate until they followed. She always had. They watched the fire, arms wrapped around their knees and cataloguing the colours of the flames – sunset red and scalding orange and threads of hot, brilliant blue. The flames Toriel would cast at them were a vibrant white, just barely touched with gold at the edges of their flicking tongues – and in so many ways, that magic was just the same as the touch of her hand. It shook the core of them.

They knew she wouldn’t hurt them. They knew she couldn’t. All the same, as she issued her challenge before the doors to the Underground, they dove and tumbled to avoid the searing whip of her flames. They wove between pillars of fire. This was a dance they knew as well as the steady rhythm of their beating heart, as well as the soft pulsing of their soul, clutched like a jewel between their hands.

When she bade them fight, they refused. They refused until she could no longer meet their eyes, until her attacks began to slide away from them, until she laughed, soft and defeated, and the memory of another time came to them unbidden – the memory of horrified betrayal on her face and the way it had felt to cut into her, like butter, like soft, hot marrow. They remembered the way she had laughed, that time. They remembered the way she had died laughing and the way her dust had stuck to their palms, and something in their stomach shifted uneasily, like the coils of a snake.

This, perhaps, was why they needed so badly to go.

She never wept, when they left, though the need was in her eyes.

Frisk stepped through the stone doors and into the brisk night beyond. They were twelve years old.


	2. Papyrus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Excuse the title change, y'all. _Onwards._

Fighting the terrible weight of their heart, they stood to face him, a salvo of bones slicing the air around their bodies – and they smiled. In many ways, Frisk envied Papyrus. They envied his undaunted innocence. They envied his exuberance and the unshakable faith in the goodness of the world that never seemed to leave him, even those times they’d seen him crumble to dust – felt it on their hands and lips.

They shook the thought from their mind. 

It anchored them: that faith, that innocence. The further they drifted from the beginning – from that patch of soft golden flowers and the feeling of the distant sun warming their skin – the harder it was to keep their mind from drifting back to it. But Papyrus: he kept them in place. He was like a lodestone, in that way. 

They’d been here before. Every place they could possibly go, they’d been before.

They’d told him this, once, they recalled, as they dropped to roll through the snow. Shards of shattered bone zipped past their ear, cut their cheek and caught in their hair. They’d told him all of it, and he’d looked at them as though they’d lost their mind, the pale pinprick lights of his eyes flickering with a painfully earnest concern. Sans had sat by – barely a presence, in that moment – and said nothing. Their silence had been terrible. 

A bright, white spark of pain pierced their narrow chest, and Frisk blinked, looking down to find their soul torn in two. It lay in the snow, the jewel-blue light of its pulse slowly going dim. Papyrus was rushing toward them, shouting something they couldn’t quite make out over the dull roar of the wind. He’d only killed them a handful of times. They couldn’t bear to look at his face, when he did.

Frisk grasped at the oncoming darkness, but there was nothing. The crystals in the cavern roof spun overhead, and for a moment, they could almost believe they were stars. They’d forgotten to SAVE. The light winked out.

They woke on a bed of golden flowers, the echo of a voice ringing in their head.

“Golly,” someone chirped, sounding tinny and small. “You didn’t last very long this time, did you?”

He crept closer, sometimes. Sometimes he met them at the very beginning. They turned their head to find him sitting a safe arm’s length away. When he appeared to them like this, he never quite came close enough to touch the flowers that had broken their fall. 

They shut their eyes, flexing their fingers, and let the vast hush of the underground speak for them. Flowey’s stem creaked as he put his head on its side, a cloying false pity colouring his voice.

“Are you giving up? Are you just going to lay there?”

Sometimes, some things, even he didn’t remember – but they did. They remembered everything. They couldn’t bring themself to hate him.

Flowey laughed, bright and thorned and gold as a bell. The sound was perverse. “How many years have you wasted on this? You’ll never get out. You’ll just die and die and die.”

He liked to say that. He liked to say it _that way_. Maybe he liked the emphasis in the repetition. 

Maybe it was the only kind of repetition he liked.

“Someday, you’ll die for real.”

Frisk drew a slow, deep breath. They’d apologize to Papyrus, when they saw him next. He wouldn’t understand, but it was important, anyway. They stood and dusted the mulch from their sweater. 

They were fourteen years old.


	3. Undyne

She was playing piano. She did that, sometimes.

The house hadn’t burned down yet. Echo flowers chirped like crickets outside her window — a hundred thousand whispers muffled by cupped hands. Once upon a time, Frisk had stopped to listen to them all.

Now, they tried to ignore the way they always said the same things. 

_It’s funny._

Through the window, in the distance, they could see the flowers’ faces turned up toward a sun they would never see, motes of light rising from the water around them.

_That’s my wish, too._

“Hey, kid.” Undyne had stopped playing, her fingers resting atop the worn keys of her piano. They could see her turning to watch them in the glass of the window, her reflection layered over the vibrant darkness of the Waterfall beyond. Her expression was pinched. A cup of tea sat atop the piano, no longer steaming. 

“It’s funny,” she began. _It’s funny, it’s funny,_ the flowers chittered.

“I can’t shake this feeling that you should want to go home. So how come you don’t?”

A long moment passed. They had no answer, none that they could give her — so they gave no answer at all. 

Her hands balled into fists.

“Hey,” she said again. “We can’t hide you forever. Asgore, he’s…”

Frisk turned to face her. “Tell me about Asgore.”

Briefly, Undyne seemed at a loss. The fins that framed her face flared out, tattered and red. “He’s our _king_ , Frisk. He’s _my_ king.”

Frisk smiled. The corners of their mouth were so heavy. “Tell me about how he taught you to fight.”

Undyne sighed, and the tension in her body snapped loose, like a bowstring released.

“Alright,” she said. “Alright.”

Leaning wearily against her piano, Undyne told them the story they wanted to hear. As she told it, she began to smile. As she told it, she began to laugh. The agitation knitting her brow smoothed away, and they remembered what she had said the first time she told it — what she always said, the first time. 

Frisk thought of the golden flower tea cooling in the mug between their palms. They thought of golden flowers, and spots of something deeper than black peppered the edges of their vision, crawling steadily inward and bringing with them a terrible, dull roar. 

They woke on a bed of golden flowers, the echo of a voice ringing in their head.

Sometimes, they thought it was funny that they couldn’t remember what came before the flowers.

Sometimes, their fingers itched for the handle of a knife.

For a long while, they simply watched the distant light overhead. They watched it change. They watched it grow pale, then flushed, then bruised. They could feel the weight of every second, as it ticked by.

“You’re getting older, aren’t you?”

They could almost imagine a thread of sorrow in his voice. 

"Can't you stop?"

They stood and walked past, and Flowey made no effort to stall them.

They were sixteen years old.


End file.
